Rifat, Claude

To document these visual delights Claude Rifat, who was trained as a scientist in Geneva after his idyllic childhood in Saudi Arabia, made extensive sketches and notes, as part of his own effort to develop a theory of mind that could be related to basic science. But because he was not an artist, he asked Gilles Roth of the Museum of Natural History in Geneva, Switzerland to redraw them in the form shown here. 

Like many of his contemporaries, Claude Rifat was drawn to experimentation with psychoactive drugs, but he soon learned that he could accomplish the effects he sought without them. Through his contact with the French psychobiologist Henri Laborit, he was inspired to elaborate models of these transformations that involve the natural neuromodulator serotonin, just as I will do in chapter 7. Claude Rifat s life has led him back to the east, but now it is the extreme orient that he calls home. There he has felt freer to pursue his self-observation based scientific inquiries and develop his personal, social, and ecological ideals. 

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